Ṣawma, Rabban (13th cent.) [Ch. of E.]

Monk of the Ch. of E. who traveled from China to Jerusalem, Rome, and Paris; his travel journal is extant.

Ṣawma was a monk of the Ch. of E. who, sometime around 1275, set out from Dadu (also known as Khān Bālīq, i.e., modern Beijing) in his native China with a younger disciple, Markos, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem . The two reached Ilkhanate Persia, but due to the ongoing threat caused by the Mamlukes, they were unable to travel further west. Upon the death of Mar Denḥa (1281), cath. of the Ch. of E., Markos was elected to the patriarchal throne and assumed the name Yahbalaha III . Following his election as patr. , he sent Ṣawma on a diplomatic mission to enlist the help of Christian Europe on behalf of Christians in the East. Ṣawma who had kept a journal, presumably in Persian, of his travels from China, continued to document his travels that took him to Constantinople, Rome, Paris, before returning to Baghdad . The record of the journey of the two monks to Baghdad, and of Ṣawma’s subsequent mission to Europe, provides a rich, eye-witness account of places, people, and events in the last half of the 13th cent. A Syriac redactor produced a truncated version of the Persian original that was popularized in English by E. A. Wallis Budge in his The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China.